Automotive Parts Assessment: Applying Real-time Instance-Segmentation Models to Identify Vehicle Parts

The problem of automated car damage assessment presents a major challenge in the auto repair and damage assessment industry. The domain has several application areas ranging from car assessment companies such as car rentals and body shops to accidental damage assessment for car insurance companies. In vehicle assessment, the damage can take any form including scratches, minor and major dents to missing parts. More often, the assessment area has a significant level of noise such as dirt, grease, oil or rush that makes an accurate identification challenging. Moreover, the identification of a particular part is the first step in the repair industry to have an accurate labour and part assessment where the presence of different car models, shapes and sizes makes the task even more challenging for a machine-learning model to perform well. To address these challenges, this research explores and applies various instance segmentation methodologies to evaluate the best performing models. The scope of this work focusses on two genres of real-time instance segmentation models due to their industrial significance, namely SipMask and Yolact. These methodologies are evaluated against a previously reported car parts dataset (DSMLR) and an internally curated dataset extracted from local car repair workshops. The Yolact-based part localization and segmentation method performed well when compared to other real-time instance mechanisms with a mAP of 66.5. For the workshop repair dataset, SipMask++ reported better accuracies for object detection with a mAP of 57.0 with outcomes for AP_IoU=.50and AP_IoU=.75 reporting 72.0 and 67.0 respectively while Yolact was found to be a better performer for AP_s with 44.0 and 2.6 for object detection and segmentation categories respectively.